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Date Published: 14/10/2026

Andalucía’s airports keep soaring, with Málaga leading a record breaking September

Four million passengers for the third month running, as the Costa del Sol edges toward 22 million for the year

Andalucía’s airports just can’t seem to slow down. September marked the third consecutive month that the region’s airports collectively passed four million passengers, reaching 4,014,161 travellers in total, a rise of 7.38% on the same month last year. Operations kept pace too, with 36,002 flights recorded across the region during September.

As ever, Málaga did the heavy lifting. The airport handled 2,805,764 passengers in September alone, up 6.3% year on year, and that’s before counting the knock on effect across the rest of Andalucía. Seville came in second with 884,976 passengers, a 7.7% rise, while several smaller airports posted genuinely impressive growth of their own. Jerez de la Frontera reached 116,140 passengers, up 12.8%, and Almería saw the biggest percentage jump of any major airport in the region, climbing 20.3% to 105,225 travellers. Granada grew more modestly at 2.3%, reaching 94,982 passengers, while Córdoba, working from a much smaller base, posted a striking 32.1% increase to reach 4,203 passengers.

It wasn’t all good news everywhere though. The Algeciras heliport in Cádiz bucked the regional trend, with passenger numbers down 11.4% to 2,871 and operations dipping slightly too.

Looking at the bigger picture, Málaga’s growth this year has been nothing short of remarkable. By the end of September, the airport had already welcomed 22,098,061 passengers, edging close to the 22,344,373 recorded across the whole of 2023, a year that was itself a record at the time before being overtaken twice since. September alone brought 2,803,178 commercial passengers, averaging 93,525 people through the terminal every single day, driven largely by international traffic, which rose 8.7% even as domestic numbers dipped slightly.

That international pull is reflected in where the growth is actually coming from. The UK remains the biggest single market by volume, with 670,319 passengers in September, followed by Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and France, while the fastest growing connections came from Lithuania, up 45.55%, and Hungary, up 43.24%, part of a wider pattern of newer European routes expanding quickly from a smaller base.

For the first nine months of the year combined, Málaga handled 22,129,948 passengers, a 6.6% rise on the same period in 2025, outpacing the growth seen across the rest of Spain’s Aena network by more than two percentage points.

All of this comes as the airport prepares for a major seven year expansion, due to begin in 2029 and backed by a €1.5 billion budget, with director Sergio Millanes explaining the works will eventually lift capacity to 36 million passengers annually, up from the current 30 million. For now though, he says the airport is coping comfortably even on its busiest days, having handled more than 107,000 passengers on a single peak summer date without any operational issues.

Image: Googlemaps

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